


the restless heart, the promised land

by pipistrelle



Series: Unauthorized Annotations On The Warrior’s Life [10]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Casual Ghost Polyamory, Episode: s06e22 A Friend In Need Part 2, F/F, Fix It, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Marriage, Post-A Friend In Need, Post-Finale, Sometimes A Family Is A Warrior Woman And Her Ghost Wife, Xena's a Ghost!verse, everyone's in love with gabrielle because how could you not be, kind of, this is what we in the biz call 'self-indulgent nonsense'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22722706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: The life of a woman with a chakram (and her wife, who is a ghost).
Relationships: Gabrielle/Xena
Series: Unauthorized Annotations On The Warrior’s Life [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1319966
Comments: 9
Kudos: 61





	the restless heart, the promised land

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory post-finale fic!
> 
> A literal viewing of the series finale suggests that the adventures of Xena and Gabrielle continue on exactly the same as they did before, except that Xena's a ghost. Last August, while I was recovering from finally have watched "A Friend in Need" and thinking about that, this fic dropped into my head more or less fully-formed. 
> 
> Intellectually, I am excited to come back to this verse in the future and play around with some of the silly and dramatic possibilities. For now, though, what you get is Angst-Fest With Happy Ending.

_When I am dead, my dearest  
Sing no sad songs for me;  
Plant thou no roses at my head,  
Nor shady cypress tree._

_-_ _When I am dead, my dearest,_ Christina Rossetti

* * *

Gabrielle grows her hair long again and wears it in one braid down her back, like she’s seen men do in Chin and women in India. An excitable young man in a desert country composes a rhapsody to her beauty, something about _skin like milk, a river of honey_. It isn’t bad imagery, though his meter could use some work. He must write it down after she leaves because she hears it again in later years, murmured here and there, sometimes chanted, once or twice sung in a voice like a nightingale’s on a dusty street corner in the crushing noonday heat.

Men (and it’s always men) sometimes try to hold her in a fight by yanking on her braid to bare her throat. Every single one of them dies from a knife wound to the belly, even when the angle of the blow seems impossible and there’s no knife in either of her hands.

A fire in Tangier destroys three dozen houses and half a market square before she diverts an aqueduct to douse it, saving a child from a collapsing doorway in the same leap. There are no deaths, but there are burns and broken bones, and destroyed livelihoods, and shattered homes. Gabrielle herself is left with a blistered burn over most of her left shoulder and a quarter of a braid that ends in a charred mess. When she's on her feet again, she chops the end of the burned braid off with the chakram she carries. Then she says farewell to her friends in town, gives a recipe for a more effective burn salve to the women in the neighborhood of the fire, and takes ship back to Europe.

The captain is an old friend, a man whose first craft she saved from pirates. He’s on deck at the great ship’s wheel, tacking the sails into the breeze, when she emerges from below and goes to the prow to gaze at the blue bulk of Hispania on the horizon. She looks as she did when he first met her, with her hair cut short, armband shining, polished sais strapped to her blood-red leather boots.

“Looks good,” he calls cheerfully across the deck. He‘s heard about the fire, of course. Everyone was talking about it in the port.

Gabrielle doesn’t seem to hear him. She leans forward, tilting her head so that the brisk fingers of the wind blow the hair back from her face, combing through the sun-bright strands like a lover’s hands, and she smiles.

\----

Jerusalem is a dry city, near as it is to the Dead Sea; yet like a lone tree on a blighted plain, it proves by its very existence the presence of deep and unseen springs.

Tzipporah, daughter of Eliezer the shepherd, feels more than most the eternal vitality of the dusty brick and stone. In the day she haggles over the spun wool from her father’s flock; in the long, hot evenings, she dances in the marketplace with tiny whispering bells at her wrists and ankles. Men toss her coins sometimes, metal flashing like flame in the fading light, but it’s hardly enough for her morning figs and she would dance even if they threw her nothing. It isn’t for money she dances, but for love.

Women often stop to watch her too, usually market women that she knows, merchants or the wives and daughters of merchants. They cast an appreciative eye over her while they fill their water jars and trade the day’s gossip, which can be worth as much as coin. Sometimes there are strangers among them too, for Jerusalem is a holy city. People come from all corners of the world to see it, and some of them happen to wander by this corner of the market in the hush of evening.

On this night there’s only one stranger, but she’s one of the strangest ones Tzipporah has seen. Her hair is short like a man’s and golden, and even after traveling in the desert her skin is fairer than any Bedouin, or any of Tzipporah’s own countrymen. Instead of the loose flowing wraps women usually wear, she’s dressed in an outlandish and immodest costume of red leather. Her lean muscles are those of a caravan guard, but she carries strange weapons. Her stare is that of a starving wolf.

Tzipporah finds her again later that night in a trader's tavern, deep in conversation with a Bedouin headman. After a while the man stands, bows deeply to her and leaves. For a moment the foreigner's face is thoughtful, almost puzzled; then her eyes light on Tzipporah and she smiles, gesturing to the empty seat at her side. Her voice is gentle and her eyes are kind, although deep with sorrow.

Her name is Gabrielle, from Greece, and she laughingly answers Tzipporah’s disbelieving questions about that distant realm of monsters and barbarians who do not read the Word. She buys two jars of spiced and honeyed wine, as a thanks for the dance, she says; and she answers Tzipporah’s other questions, briefly but honestly, about the grief she carries for a lover who is dead.

She is undoubtedly strange in more than her looks — more than once her eyes flicker over something no one else can see, and she pauses mid-sentence, listening to some whisper under the chatter of the room. But even in her sorrow and strangeness she is beautiful. Perhaps especially in her sorrow. When Tzipporah tells her that, she laughs again. Tzipporah likes her laugh, and the way she carries the sadness of her lost love. 

She's in Jerusalem looking for some scrolls -- Tzipporah found out that much before ever speaking to her, from hearing about the questions she's been asking around town all day. But Gabrielle doesn't want to talk about the scrolls she came for, so she tells the story of another scroll she encountered long ago, one cursed by a heathen god to make everything written on it come true. That story turns into other stories; pirates and minotaurs, harpies and angels. Gabrielle is an excellent story-teller, and soon a crowd gathers. By the time she drains her third cup of wine she's perched unsteadily on a table, declaiming of great battles and beautiful women. Wobbling dangerously as she demonstrates a particular flourish of swordsmanship, she puts out a hand to steady herself on a chair and finds herself holding onto Tzipporah instead. "Oh. Hello," she says, and the flush and grin spread across her face together.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” The tavern crowd would have kept her there all night, but the moon is high and Tzipporah's had enough of stories. She leads an unprotesting Gabrielle through disappointed jeers and showers of coins, into a dim alleyway where it isn’t so hot and crowded. “Wait here.”

The stark moonlight makes the city into a different world altogether, shifting the stone hues and dyed cloths of the day into a sea of textured shadows. Tzipporah darts over to the nearest well and comes back with a jar of water and a basket of dates from a friend's stall. She rounds the sharp jut of the wall on silent feet and sees Gabrielle laughing and flailing one-handed at the air as though fending off an invisible assailant. Loud, indignant, Gabrielle cries, “Oh, like _you_ didn’t flirt with every eligible warlord from here to the Hesperides!”

There’s no one else in the alley, not even the whisper of retreating steps. Gabrielle catches sight of Tzipporah and blinks, then starts up, remembering that she should be embarrassed to be caught talking to nothing. “Sorry, I thought I… heard… something.”

“Stray cats?” Tzipporah suggests. ”The wind? I’ve never heard of them flirting with warlords, but perhaps things are different where you come from.”

Gabrielle tries to smile, but she’s nervous in a way she hasn’t been all night. “No. I hear…a voice, sometimes. Especially when it’s quiet. It’s not — I mean — I won’t harm you,” she adds hurriedly. “There’s nothing to fear. I swear it.”

“I’m not afraid of you, barbarian,” Tzipporah says, low and teasing. The flush on Gabrielle’s face has spread to her neck, and Tzipporah wonders how much of her it covers.“Or any djinn you tracked in from the desert.”

The relief on Gabrielle’s face is genuine and as sweet as spring water. “She’s not a djinni,” she sighs, accepting the dates Tzipporah hands her.

“A daughter of Jerusalem knows such things,” Tzipporah agrees. “You aren’t the only one to converse with spirits. Holy men and women are visited by angels often, here. And many a prophet has come out of the desert.” She touches Gabrielle’s cheek, looks into those deep blue eyes, then lifts her hand to stroke that fascinating golden hair. “Perhaps you are a prophet, Gabrielle of Greece?”

“Oh, no,” Gabrielle says, with equal distress and amusement. “No, that isn’t it at all, it’s not — _shut up_ , she doesn’t know, it’s not her fault! Oh, she _hates_ that — “ Gabrielle covers her face with her hands, suppressing a burst of laughter.

Tzipporah smiles serenely. “I should have expected this. Foreigners are always odd, and prophets always a little mad.” 

“And what,” Gabrielle says, recovering, “is a daughter of Jerusalem like?”

“Perhaps you and your djinni will have to stay and find out.”

\----

Gabrielle dreams of cities burning. But they left the city behind weeks ago, to find the fabled lands upriver. Eriayomi was to guide them over the treacherous waters, past the hostile jungle-dwellers with their tame spotted cats and poison-tipped arrows.

She remembers the arrows, and the spears: shafts of dark shiny wood and barbed heads of beaten copper bursting from silent undergrowth. No cities, no buildings, no sign of human habitation anywhere, only jungle. Featureless and devouring, haunted by the screams of monkeys and macaws overhead in that deadly, tranquil green.

Her left side is a throbbing agony. When the pain recedes a little she pulls herself doggedly forward, towards the prow of the canoe, to see if Eriayomi’s body is still laying limp there with an arrow in her chest. She remembers that, remembers Eriayomi slumping forward. She remembers Zuma laying her down on the bottom of the boat and telling her to be still. That must have been just after she was hit. She can’t remember what happened to them, whether they fell into the river or were taken. 

She doesn’t know how long it’s been since the attack, how long she’s been drifting. In Eriayomi’s stories the river went on forever, all the way to the homes of her gods, farther from the earth than Olympus. She has no fear of being carried there. The sun here is feral, its gods vengeful and jealous of strangers. Surely they’ll kill her before the canoe drifts that far.

Even with the pain in her side, the worst torment is thirst. She roots through the jumbled pile of their packs for the last waterskin, only to find it pierced and bristling with arrows. Most of its conents have dripped out to mingle with the brackish river water and blood in the bottom of the boat. She tries to drink from the river, indignant at the idea of dying from thirst while afloat, but there’s something wrong with her shoulder and she can’t lift herself enough to reach over the side. She blacks out trying, and when she wakes again it's to a haze in which neither thirst nor pain seem to mean very much. 

Once or twice she thinks of Xena. Mostly she thinks of nothing at all.

She must have slept or fainted, for she wakes at last with Xena’s palm against her cheek, blessedly cool — not grave-cold, but chilled, as though Xena stepped onto the canoe straight from that icy mountaintop with its hidden spring. “It’s all right,” she’s saying. “Easy, Gabrielle. You’ll be all right.”

For the first time since the attack, a blessed shadow passes between Gabrielle and the scorching sun. Tears form in Gabrielle’s eyes, though she’d thought all the water in her body dried out long ago. “Xena,” she croaks. “I wondered…when you would…”

“Hush. Save your strength.” Xena holds her wrist in one hand, measuring the beat of her heart. “This wound will be infected if it isn’t treated soon. And you’ve lost a lot of blood. Here.” She raises Gabrielle’s head, leans over and cups a handful of water from the river. Gabrielle tries to warn her of the danger, the fish and eels that lurk beneath the surface, but her voice has no strength, and Xena gives no sign that she’s been hurt. Maybe she can’t be hurt.

The water is clear and cool, which is strange, since Gabrielle remembers it being full of silt. But she drinks greedily, until Xena says “Enough,” and lays her flat again, taking Gabrielle’s own hand in hers and pressing it to the wound in her side. “The ones you’re looking for are close by, but they won’t recognize your clothes. You’ll have to find a way to let them know you’re a friend.”

“It won’t…matter. I’ll go with you.” It‘ll be soon. There‘s death in her wound, she felt it the moment she pulled the barbed spear-head free. It couldn’t have been poison, or she wouldn’t have lasted this long, but it makes no difference. Nothing makes any difference, now that Xena’s here. “Where will you… take me?”

“Gabrielle,” Xena says softly, pained.

Surely if they were going to the Elysian Fields, Xena would be happy. But perhaps the Elysian Fields and the bright place she saw from the cross are closed to Gabrielle. After all, she shed blood in the name of love and then left her only love in the chill of the grave, entombed in the guilt of a burning city. Perhaps Xena has been sent to guide her to Tartarus as a last cruel irony.

“It isn’t a punishment,” Gabrielle tells her. Speaking is hard; It hurts to breathe too deeply. “Not even that other place, the darkness. Hell. Not if you guide me there. I’d go…anywhere with you. Don’t they…know that by now?”

“You’re not going anywhere, except to shore. My brave Gabrielle.” Xena’s eyes are bright, shining with tears, but her will is strong enough to hold back the waters of the flood that once drowned the earth. She does not weep. She takes Gabrielle’s face in her cold hands, as though the fevered heat of Gabrielle’s skin can warm them. “You've always faced death with courage, when it came. But it hasn’t come yet. The world needs you — life needs you. And you have so much life still to live.”

It takes a long moment for Xena’s words, the yearning in her touch, to translate into meaning. When it does, Gabrielle reaches for Xena as though she’s about to be snatched away by heraldic angels. “Take me with you,” she moans. “I’m so tired, Xena. Don’t leave me again.”

“Never,” Xena says at once. She looks up and away briefly, into the hot blazing sky, or the vine-webbed branches of the canopy. Her lips curve into a faint smile. Like the call of a clear silver trumpet, piercing through the pain, she says, ”Never in life or death will I leave you, Gabrielle. As long as your heart welcomes me, no god or mortal may bid me leave your side.”

The words are old and formal, and familiar. Gabrielle learned them when she first became an Amazon Queen, along with the rites for funerals, births, and the initiation of new sisters.

The answer surfaces from the dark well of memory. “For as long as the moon rises, my heart will call to you, and answer your call.”

Xena’s voice is low and soft now, a whisper, the way they used to talk in the depths of night, in one bedroll, under the wandering stars. “A sword or spear may part my body from your body, but no enemy’s cunning can part our souls.”

“In the sight of our mothers who came before us and our daughters to come…” Pain stabs through Gabrielle's ribs and she chokes, gasping. “S-shield and strengthen —”

“Say it,” Xena urges. “You must say it, Gabrielle.”

“My love will shield and strengthen you,” Gabrielle says.

She feels the seal of the vow that Xena presses onto her forehead, a long and lingering kiss. “Good. It’ll be all right now. Don’t be afraid.”

A dull _thunk_ of splintering wood. A cruel barbed arrow-point pierces the hull above Gabrielle’s head. The whole canoe shudders. More arrows hit, half a dozen all on one side, and the sky is swallowed up in green as the canoe is hauled to the riverbank.

Xena’s gone. Instead a stranger leans over Gabrielle, face concealed behind a fierce mask in the shape of a snarling spotted jungle cat. “She doesn’t dress like one of our sisters. And she’s pale as a dead fish.”

Another voice close by says, “I’m telling you, Talli, I was hidden in the branches and I heard her speak the words of the marriage rite. She knows our ways.”

“Who was she marrying out there, a piranha? She’s a foreigner. And almost dead herself.” The cat-masked woman nudges Gabrielle with the butt of her spear — a long shaft of dark wood with a head of beaten copper, twin to the ones that killed Zuma and Eriayomi. “Perhaps you misheard her. Foreigners are no concern of ours. We could go hunting for an hour and let the jaguars finish her. They’d thank us for such a sacrifice.”

“I know what I heard! Would you risk killing one of your own sisters? The jaguars would hunt _you_.”

“Amazons,” Gabrielle rasps. “Sisters…I came…looking… from the north…”

“You see!” The second voice cries. “We’ve always heard stories that some other tribes survived. She comes from one of them! We must honor her — she is no foreigner, she is a guest.”

“Very well,” the cat-masked woman says at last. “At least she has a sturdy canoe. We’ll carry her back in it and let the Queen decide.”

As the two Amazons heft the canoe with easy strength Gabrielle feels Xena’s hand brush her cheek once more, the chill of Xena’s lips pressed to hers. _It’ll be all right now_ , Xena whispers. She closes her eyes.

\----

A kind farmer sees her hobbling along the lane and gives her a ride on his cart as far as Porthia, which turns out to be a peaceful, prosperous village. It’s almost noon. Farmers and their families are resting in the square, drinking wine, gossiping. They make a place for her in the shade, bring her bread and cheese, ask her where she came from and where she’s bound. Her staff, with its bandings of strange metal and elaborately carved designs from foreign lands, is much admired by the children. When she finally gets going again, stiff but determined, a small herd of them follow her for a good quarter of an hour before they scatter, distracted by some game of their own.

The sun is still high when she rounds a bend and sees the thatched roof of the house that once belonged to Xena’s grandmother, and then briefly to Ares. The fence is in better repair than it ever was in those days, the gate standing open. Through it Gabrielle can see the pigpen with its two surly well-fed sows, and the vegetable beds, and the dark-haired woman kneeling in a patch of green with her hands deep in the dirt.

Gabrielle stops, unsure whether to call out and what to say, but she doesn't need to. Eve looks up as though at a shout and comes running, nimbly dodging chickens. Gabrielle half-expects her to vault one-handed over the fence, as Xena might have done once. The thought brings a smile to her face. But Eve takes the easier route through the open gate, saving her energy for a rib-cracking hug.

“I dreamed you would come,” Eve says, kissing Gabrielle’s cheek. “Oh, it’s so good to see you!"

“It’s good to see you, too.” Eve is old now, too, but she’s strong, still as lean and wiry as her own mother was well after her fortieth year. She’s acquired the deep tan of a farmer and gardener, and there’s a single streak of gray in her pinned curls, but other than that she hardly looks different than the girl who first turned to walk the Way of Love. Gabrielle squeezes her hands. “You look well.”

“You look exhausted,” Eve says sternly. “You must stay for a good long while this time.”

Gabrielle leans heavily on her staff. Her knee’s never really been the same since Patagonia, and the ache deep in her bones predicts rain before tomorrow’s dawn. “Yes, I think I will. For a long while.” 

Eve’s gaze flicks past Gabrielle, to the bright empty air just behind her. Gabrielle touches the insubstantial hand resting on her shoulder, traces Xena’s calloused knuckles with her fingertips. At least she can do it in the open, here, without attempting to disguise the movement. “We both will.”

Eve looks back at Gabrielle, her eyes solemn but bright. “All the times she wasn’t here with me, I knew she’d be with you, wherever you were. That’s how I knew you were all right.” She tucks Gabrielle’s arm through hers. “Come on. There’s someone you have to meet.”

On the other side of the house is a little pond, its shores planted with water-lillies. A solemn, gangly, dark-haired girl of five or six is crouched among them, staring intently at the glassy surface of the water. For a few heartbeats she's utterly, almost unnaturally still, heedless of her audience. Then she lunges into the pond with a shriek. When she bobs to the surface she’s encrusted with duckweed and silt, and ecstatic with joy.

“Mama! I almost got him!” 

“Next time, love,” Eve tells her, but she’s already out of the water and running off toward the olive grove. “She’s going to find worms,” Eve explains to Gabrielle. “Or beetles. She thinks feeding the fish will make him fat and lazy.”

Gabrielle clings to Eve’s arm harder than she means to, but with that and her staff to lean on, she can just about weather the shock. Eve's cared for countless orphans and foundlings, but even in a child Gabrielle recognizes that patience, that indomitable wildness. She knows without seeing them how blue the girl’s eyes will be.

When she's come back to this house before it's been to rest, to rediscover something that she lost track of on the steppes or the open seas. Usually she stays for a few months, until a restlessness that's only half hers seizes her again and drives her out onto the open roads, to see strange faces and ease what she can of their pains and perils. All that, she realizes, is over now. The future shifts, narrows, sharpens. It’s hard to breathe. The grip on her shoulder clenches painfully, shivers down her spine and vanishes. “She’s --?”

Eve smiles. “Her name’s Lilith. I’ve been telling her stories about you.”

Instinctively Gabrielle reaches for Xena’s hand. It isn’t there. If she squints against the glare, she can just see the shadow of leather boots running in the child’s footsteps toward the dappled shade of the orchard. A ribbon of faint laughter drifts back on a nonexistent breeze.

Gabrielle lets herself be steered away, into the house. She’s grateful for the chair Eve offers her at the well-scrubbed table, decorated all over with the determined carvings of a child enthusiastically learning how to use a knife.

“Eve, she’s -- she’s beautiful.”

Eve can’t conceal the pride of any mother at hearing her child praised, but there’s a hint of gravity in her manner as she pours wine for them both. “She’s fearless, and she’s getting old enough that the stories aren’t enough. She needs to know more about the world than just this farm and the village. When Eli showed me that you’d be coming soon… I hoped I could convince you to stay, not just for your sake but for ours, too. She needs to learn from her grandmother’s wisdom.”

Gabrielle takes the wine and stares into it for a moment until she can trust herself to speak. “Of course, I’ll tell her everything Xena says, and — I can’t train her like Xena could, but I can teach her to defend herself —“

Eve takes her hand. “Gabrielle. She needs the wisdom of _both_ her grandmothers.”

“Yes,” Gabrielle says. “Of course.”

\----

The road is long and winding, untroubled by any sign of human or horse. It might have been waiting here, not a single grain of sun-baked dust disturbed, since the gods made the world. The trees on either side are tough, gnarled old olive-trees as might line any road from Rome to Iberia. Above and ahead looms the blue shadow of an unfamiliar mountain.

Her knee doesn’t hurt, and her muscles don’t ache, and her vision is sharper than it’s been in years. She doesn’t remember the last time she felt this good.

She also doesn’t remember going down any road, well-traveled or otherwise. The last thing she remembers is falling asleep. She remembers the cold-throated roar of the wind out of the north as it battered against the wall looking for cracks to creep in through, and underneath it the crackling of the hearth-fire in the next room, woven all through with the faint golden thread of Lilith singing. The winters have been getting longer and harder, and this one was the hardest yet. But it didn't seem to matter as much, when Lilith was singing.

There’s no singing here, not even birds twittering in the trees. Aloud, Gabrielle asks, "Is this a dream?"

Xena takes her hand. Her skin is warm. "Does it feel like a dream?"

"No." That little house snug against the wind feels like a dream -- a long one, and not a bad one, not at all. But already it's starting to fade, like a ghost with the morning. "I feel like -- like I'm waking up."

“Took you long enough,” Xena drawls.

“I always thought you would come for me.” It slips out as an accusation, petulant, as though Xena had run off after brigands first thing in the morning even though she _knew_ it was her turn to cook breakfast.

Xena laughs. Gabrielle slips an arm around her waist. Xena's in her old battle-gear, breastplate with its sharp curves and brass-plaited leather skirt, and Gabrielle's twenty-five again and dressed in _her_ old battle-gear, which barely counts as being dressed at all. Part of her thinks that she should feel the scrape and poke of inconvenient metal on bare skin, but somehow she doesn't. Xena presses her lips to the place where the line of Gabrielle's neck dips to meet her shoulder, and into that softness she says, “How could I come for you? I never left.”

Gabrielle kisses her. There's heat in it, and hunger, but no haste. All the years of yearning heartache are behind her now, and she has a feeling that time was left behind with pain and winter. Breathless, she says, “Where are we going now?”

Xena frees one hand long enough to gesture at the mountain's peak.

It’ll take them a few days and nights at least to reach the foothills. They'll live off whatever they can catch or find growing, and they'll sleep close and tangled in piles of leaves, or on soft beds of moss and clover. And then there will be the climb; a path steep in places but always clear, running up through cairns of ancient stone, skirting chasms, following the exuberant cascade of brisk young glacial streams. It might have been a trek of weeks, in their other life. Gabrielle doesn't know how long it will take here, or if the question means anything.

They'll reach the summit eventually, and in the meantime there's no hurry. It's the journey that's always mattered, in the end.


End file.
